Just 10 stocks accounted for nearly all of the Nasdaq-100's gains in the first half of the year

According to Jefferies, 10 stocks in the Nasdaq-100 accounted for 99% of the index’s returns during the first six months of the year, as reported by MarketWatch. From January through June, the Nasdaq-100 rose by about 20%.

The main driver of the index’s growth was the stock of memory manufacturer Micron Technology: its shares accounted for 26% of the Nasdaq-100’s return and 17% of the S&P 500’s gain. In the last quarter alone, Micron’s stock rose by more than 240%, adding approximately $920 billion to the company’s market capitalization. Last week, the chipmaker reported that its revenue more than quadrupled in the last quarter due to record-high memory prices and demand from AI chip manufacturers.

Shares of chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices contributed another 16% to the Nasdaq-100’s gain. Shares of Intel, a processor developer and manufacturer, rose 14%; Applied Materials, a supplier of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, rose 10%; Lam Research, a manufacturer of silicon wafer processing equipment, rose 9%; and KLA, a supplier of quality control and measurement equipment for chip manufacturing, by 6%. Shares of SanDisk, a manufacturer of data storage devices, and Marvell Technology, a developer of chips and networking solutions for data centers, each contributed 5% to the index’s gains, while Cisco Systems, a provider of networking equipment and enterprise IT solutions, and Western Digital, a manufacturer of data storage systems, each contributed 4%.

Thus, the top 10 stocks in the Nasdaq-100 in the first half of the year are related to chips, chip manufacturing equipment, memory, network infrastructure, or related technology sectors.

However, most of the leaders of this AI rally started the new quarter with a decline. For example, Micron’s stock plummeted nearly 10% on July 1, AMD’s fell 6%, and Intel’s dropped 8.6%. On Wednesday, investors sold off shares of semiconductor companies to lock in profits after a broad range of such stocks rose by more than 80% in the first half of the year, according to CNBC.

At the same time, the underperformers of the first half of the year—stocks that had been hit hard by the “software apocalypse”—began to rebound. ServiceNow shares rose 7.1%, Salesforce shares rose 4.8%, and Intuit rose 3.6%. “The most notable trend is the rotation between leaders and laggards, which we are currently seeing as the calendar quarter turns,” wrote Jeffrey Favuzza, an analyst in the trading department at Jefferies.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor